27/02/2017
NEWS STORY
Last week, as the cars were unveiled one after another, the size and ugliness of the dorsal fins grew. Thankfully, that adorning the Mercedes wasn't too bad, and then today the German team followed the example of its rivals and went full-sail.
Speaking to reporters as testing got underway at Barcelona, Red Bull boss Christian Horner admitted that not only is his team against the fins, it tried to have them out-lawed.
"I think the cars look fantastic," he said, "the only thing that lets them down is the shark fins.
"It's something that we raised at the Formula One Strategy Group meeting last year, to ask that all teams remove them," he continued, "because it is pretty marginal the performance gain that they offer. In the interests of aesthetics, it was requested that they be removed. That went to the Formula One commission and unfortunately was immediately rejected by the majority of teams.
"I think it's wrong to ignore the aesthetics on a car," added the Briton. "Unfortunately this is a consequence of the rules but one that should have been able to be addressed quite quickly."
Red Bull's is as big as any of them, albeit fairly well disguised by the team's logo.
However, aesthetics or not, if Newey - who has after all, collaborated on Ben Ainslie's Americas Cup bid - believed they didn't deliver value to the RB13 it wouldn't be on there... or is he merely playing the 'if you can't beat them, join them' game?